The Glass Collector

The Glass Collector is a quiet book. You read and you read and then you begin to worry that there isn’t enough of the book left for the big plot development. But as I thought this, it occurred to me that perhaps we didn’t need a big exciting bang. It never got boring (and I know that’s a dreadful ‘compliment’ to make) and it was quite restful to simply coast along.

Anna Perera has written the story about Aaron, a Christian 15-year-old living in Mokattam just outside Cairo. The Zabbaleen collect rubbish, and Aaron’s speciality is glass. He loves glass. He is good at glass, and never cuts himself when picking it up.

Aaron is an orphan, living with a not very kind stepfather and two stepbrothers. Things are bad to begin with, and they become worse. Their living more or less disappears, and Aaron’s stepbrother Lijah is cruel, the neighbour’s daughter Shareen teases him, and Aaron is secretly in love with Rachel, who looks after the horses.

Rachel wants to become a vet, and in any other book she would somehow find a way, despite her poverty. Many of the young people around Aaron have dreams. Shareen wants a rich and handsome young husband. Aaron’s friend Abe wants a jellyfish.

This book is more of a window on the lives of the people in Mokattam than a story, which might be why the Guardian’s reviewer was surprised Anna hadn’t made it a travel book instead. It’s just right as it is, and as Anna pointed out when I met her, she made most of it up. Hence the fiction label. She went to Cairo to research the lives of the Zabbaleen, but then she wove a story about them, removing many things she felt would have detracted from what she was trying to do.

It’s truly educational, and I hope it will make western readers produce less waste, and hopefully even make them want fewer things. Buy less, and recycle more. If sorting through rubbish turns you off it could be a good idea to generate less of it in the first place.

The end makes you feel quietly happy and satisfied. At least that’s how it was for me. We rarely get everlasting happy-ever-after in real life, so why expect it in every book we read? The Glass Collector has good and bad in it, just like real life. It’s not a bad thing to learn to appreciate what you have. It could always be worse.

2 responses to “The Glass Collector”

Interesting that you say this is a ‘quiet’ book, in a not disapproving way. I’m often told my books are quiet, and this tends to happen in a head-shaking, oh-what-a-shame kind of way. But I think there is an enormous amount of drama in apparently quiet lives, and you don’t necessarily have to have amazing firework displays to create interest – though of course they are good too. Children are people too, and they like a variety of books – not just noisy ones. Well, I hope so, anyway!

You’re right. We need less of a lot of things. Not just pruning our belongings. Why does something have to happen all the time? Think how nice it can be to look ahead to a few days when you know you ‘don’t have to do anything’. This book is full of stuff, just not constant explosions of action and big turning points. I came away with a feeling that I knew these people’s lives, which are so different from ours, but still good. Aaron has the opportunity to try the alternative for a few weeks, and he finds it’s not for him. It’s that kind of discovery we need to make.

On more recent occasions we have opted to shop, or merely browse, at the Scottish Antique & Arts Centre outside Doune, and then got in the car to have tea somewhere else. But then, it can be nice to sit … Continue reading →